When it comes to professional image editing, few companies offer a more varied, powerful and revered tool set than Adobe. Accompanying the world famous Photoshop is Lightroom, which offers its users a novel way to organize and manage digital images, and today, Adobe has released a free public beta of Photoshop Lightroom 5.0.

The verb of Photoshopping has been synonymous with the art of image editing for many a year, but as the professionals will know well, Photoshop is much more than a singular application. There are many products encompassed by and associated with the Adobe Creative Suite, and Photoshop Lightroom is seen as essential by many for purpose of viewing, editing and managing images created.

This beta comes just over a year after the official release of Photoshop Lightroom 4.0, and brings with it a plethora of new and exciting features to the roster. The Advanced Healing Brush, for example, has been implemented to help users amend those defects and blemishes with a single brush stroke, while the Radial Gradient tool will help you to create off-center or multiple vignette areas within an image.

There are a bunch of other features besides, and although this is a beta (and thus, may well have its fair share of imperfections), it provides a great way for prospective Lightroom 5.0 purchasers to get a taste of what’s upcoming in the official release. The final version of Lightroom 4.0 costs $149, and while this is not an extortion for what is actually a very powerful piece of software, the beta allows the people to assess whether they think version 5.0 will be worth parting with such vast quantities of money for.

With offline editing, video slideshow sharing and improved photo book creation, Adobe has really gone to town in an attempt to try and improve Lightroom, and although we haven’t had a chance to give the beta of version 5.0 a try for ourselves, it looks, on the face of it, to be well worth checking out.

Available for both Microsoft Windows and Apple’s OS X, you can grab the beta via the link below, and be sure to let us know what you think of it by dropping us a comment through the usual mediums.